an n8n labs experiment · v1.0.0

Discover what you could automate

Give your agent access to one source of work. Automation Mining finds repeated manual tasks and returns up to five proposals. Each links to the source activity, gives a work count, and describes a possible automation. You choose what to build.

Install the skill Read the method
claude — example session
❯ /automation-mining
Before I read anything, here is what I can see:
Slack12 channels you are inGmail + Calendaryour inbox, your meetingsLinear2 teamsSessions130 of ours, last 26 days
Read-only throughout. I keep pointers, not message text.
One question first. What is your work mostly, and where do people ask you for things?
❯ ops for a 40-person team. mostly #ops-requests. mine it, last 30 days
Mines the places you work, one surface at a time
Slack Gmail Linear Notion Salesforce Jira Agent sessionsAgent memory+ any connector

Things it finds

Repeated work often leaves a clear pattern. Browse twelve anonymized examples, with counts as recorded.

Rituals you run for your own AI

The same prep sheet asked for, plus 14 transcripts pasted in by hand, in 26 days. The calendar already linked both.

17×
Email you turn into task by hand

Star it, open Notion, retype the title, paste the link. About 48 a day, every day, for nearly three years.

48/day
Ticket you hand-carry to another team

Look up the account, post, paste the link back, chase. 2.5 days each, 694 more tickets behind them.

19×
Question your team answers from memory

"Bug or by design?", "who owns this?" In 90 days, answered from four people's heads. Nothing written down.

38×
Meeting notes written up by hand

9 of 9 call transcripts already sat in Drive. 4 got a write-up, typed out afterwards. The overlap between one meeting and the next surfaced 12 times in two weeks.

12×
Date you copy from an email into the calendar

School event, dentist, flight. Read the mail, open the calendar, type it again. 2,096 times before anyone called it a process.

2,096×
Check you run by hand before every PR

Structural validation of the changelog page, run manually in 7 sessions and 8 PRs in 30 days. Real, but plumbing on top of what already works.

8×
Transcript you file and never find again

Meeting ends, transcript saved, summarized, sorted by topic into a folder. One person did it 4,409 times over two and a half years.

4,409×
Lead you enrich by hand

New sign-up lands. Look up the company, the size, the role; paste it into the CRM; ping sales. Eight tabs, every time.

~40/wk
Weekly status typed from memory

Recording to notes by hand, action items never reaching a tracker, a Slack thread relayed into Notion. Five jobs across three teams' spaces.

5
Newsletters you mean to read

Skim, tag, file the useful ones. 5,935 issues in two years. A summary and a tag would have done the same job.

5,935×
Slack status you set from your calendar

In a call, at lunch, out. Set by hand from the same calendar that already knows. 1,993 times.

1,993×

It also finds work that already runs and skips work that is not worth building. Names are removed; counts match the source records.

Why it works this way

Start with the work you know

Start with one source and a clear time window. Review the findings, then approve each new source before the skill reads it. Every proposal links to records you can check.

Where the method starts

Learn from workflow patterns

A taxonomy of 907,353 n8n workflow rows helped define task patterns. Feedback refined the instructions; model weights stayed fixed. We tested the procedure on separate synthetic company data.

The method, measured

Built from workflow patterns. Tested on separate synthetic data.

Alises, A. (2026). Improving Automation Discovery with a Workflow Taxonomy. n8n, 9 September 2026 · Whitepaper
Where the task knowledge came from

n8n's workflow taxonomy: 907,353 workflow rows across 100,282 instances, turned into task definitions.

How the skill was trained

Feedback on task, citations, change and count reshaped the instruction text. Model weights stayed fixed.

How it was tested

57 unseen synthetic companies, two reader models, strict checks. Empty reports score zero.

MeasureStarting skillReleased procedurePaired change95% interval
Useful proposal quality a44.7%53.0%+8.3 pts[0.3, 16.8]
Verified task recall b28.2%51.7%+23.5 pts[13.0, 34.4]
a A proposal counts only if it passes checks for supported human work, work removal, a correct count, resolving citations and distinct work instances.
b Test set: 57 synthetic companies, 105 tasks, 4,844 records across Slack, Notion, Linear and Salesforce; 18 companies had no keyed task. 342 complete reports. Results compare both models on the same companies. We report 95% confidence intervals.

These results compare the released procedure with its starting version on synthetic records. They do not measure the full interactive flow or time saved by real teams.

We tested a later version on 116 more synthetic companies. It did not pass the release rule, so version 1.0.0 keeps the confirmed procedure. A separate comparison with a short prompt did not show a clear gain in proposal quality. Read the whitepaper for the full method and its limits.

Good to know

Read-only while it mines
It does not post, edit, or react to anything it reads. Building an automation is a separate step. The skill asks for your approval first.
Links, not copied messages
Reports use links and counts. They do not copy message text, personal data, or credentials. Your agent and model provider process data under your account settings.
Your own work
Use your own work or a channel you are in. Tell the channel before you mine it.
Keep the main session focused
If your host supports it, helper agents read the records. The main session receives the findings and your choices.
Start with one source
Choose a source and a time window. Run time and model cost depend on your agent, tools, and records.

Install the skill

npx skills@latest add n8n-io/automation-mining-skill --skill automation-mining

Then start with either prompt:

"mine my Claude Code sessions from the last two weeks for automations"
needs nothing connected
"mine #channel-you-are-in, last 30 days"
needs a Slack connection in your agent

Works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Pi, and other hosts that support Agent Skills.

Found it? Build it in n8n.

Each accepted proposal names a trigger, an action, its result, and checks that need a person. Use it as a starting point for an n8n workflow.

Explore n8nInstall the skill